If you’ll allow me a moment of annoying immodesty: I’m a creative person. I’ve built a career on coming up with ideas and converting them into articles. (I’m now in my ninth year of writing for InsideHook.) In my free time, I also write. Mostly fiction, along with some essays and poetry.
Typically, whenever I have an idea, I thumb a typo-ridden reminder in my Notes app, jot it down on my beloved Peanuts stationery or force-control my brain to commit it to memory.
I almost always generate these ideas — big or small; a blurry headline or a verbatim lede for a story — while not at work. They arrive when I’m on a walk, in the shower or on vacation. On the rare occasion that I’m granted an idea at work, it’s invariably when I get up to go to the bathroom. I learned long ago that the most exhilarating, out-of-the-blue ideas hide in protest until I step away from a screen.
The butt-in-seat side of my job is less about creativity and more about the “conversion” bit I mentioned above. It’s production. Enough of the ideation has happened ahead of time that I can enter the flow state — I can “cook,” as the kids say. I can’t imagine showing up to work without any clue what I’m going to write about (or what my angle is for that thing, or why I should care) and figuring all of that out on the fly.
Candidly, this has always led to a bit of tug-of-war in the digital media-sphere. It’s difficult for boardroom types to understand (or give credit to) how much creative preparation occurs outside of the work they see (fingers, typing). I consider my job 24/7. I get ideas from dreams.
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Over the past few years, though, I’ve often noticed the quantity of my ideas lagging. The well will feel dry, I’ll wonder why, then the next idea will arrive and I’ll move on. Ah, I’m fine. But I’m not fine. More often than I’d care to admit, I find myself distracted and impatient and short on inspiration. My mind is wandering without daydreaming; my temper is short without cause.
I’ve come to believe that I’ve had fewer ideas these last few years because I’m sharing fewer moments with the world. There are many moments throughout the day where it feels like I’m living in the world…but am I? I’m listening to podcasts. I’m watching short videos. I’m subscribing to newsletters, congratulating people for finishing books and congratulating people for finishing runs. I can be outraged or overjoyed in the same minute.
There’s a phrase for this: digital dementia. It’s the robber baron of our age, stealing our creativity (our curiosity, our empathy and even our memories) with impunity. It paves a fast track to disenchantment.
The World Has Become “Thinner”
In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year, the great Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard touched on this exact topic: “It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think that this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true; it empties the world; it becomes thinner.”
Among the variety of ways that Knausgaard has sought relief and understanding, he’s restored the garden in his yard in London. The same garden he long ignored. “I saw [the plants] go from being green and succulent to yellow and finally gray and dry; I stared straight at them every time I parked in front of the house…[But] the second the front door shut behind me I forgot all about them,” he wrote.
And then — brought on by confusion, or shame or some sort of yearning — something changed. Knausgaard started digging holes, planting new flowers and bushes, and faithfully watering them whenever they needed it. “[The garden] became full of meaning,” he wrote. “It was immensely satisfying…for some reason, it felt good thinking about them…the more time I spent there, the more I saw what needed doing.”
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Knausgaard is a complex writer, and I certainly wouldn’t want to reduce a gorgeous, nearly 11,000-word essay to some platitudes on the mental health benefits of a gardening hobby.
But the fact remains: if you want to crawl out of today’s digital wormhole, you have to change something. There must be some behavior — some bit of time or space in your daily routine — that you can reanimate with meaning.
A Different Kind of Commute
A month ago, tired after a long day at work, I began my commute home. For the first time this year, it was dark as I left the office. The ground was slick; it had started raining after lunch. I raced someone on the sidewalk, annoyed that their umbrella kept puncturing my periphery, then took an opportunity to jaywalk across the street, though I didn’t see the food delivery moped coming. It skirted around me, each of us cursing the other, and I descended into the N/Q/R/W station feeling wet, hungry and misanthropic.
The service is usually superb on that line (in fact, you can get a solid connection throughout most of the system now), but on this particular night, it was lagging. Apps weren’t opening properly. It was annoying enough for me to put my phone away and scoop my AirPods out of my ears. I remember blinking in surprise. The train was packed, but it was as quiet as a chapel.
I switched to the L, which was even more crowded, but kept my tech in my backpack. It’s only four stops (seven minutes, tops) to my exit in Brooklyn, and it felt like forever. Wary of people thinking I was staring at them, or whatever they were doing on their phones, I resolved to study the shoes people chose for this workday. I saw a lot of wet sneakers. I guess the rain took people by surprise.
Finally, the 15-minute walk from the train to my apartment. Each block or two, I started to feel a little more hopeful. I noticed a new sushi spot. I waved to a friend. I heard church bells emanating from Saints Peter and Paul Parish Church. How many years have I lived in the area? For the life of me, I couldn’t remember ever hearing those bells before. When I reached my front stoop, I had a good idea for a novel. It was almost spooky.
What Should You Do?
Distance from our digital lives is absolutely critical. Many of us have intuited this for a while. But I think 2025 was the year everyone really started saying it out loud.
Actually cultivating that distance is a different challenge. As Ian Bogost wrote in a recent article for The Atlantic: “Screen time is the speed of life today.” Indeed. Screen time is heavy with responsibility and pressure. Good luck getting rid of it. But we can all get better at living with it. Start by unplugging on your commute home, taking a closer look at your garden or cooking for your significant other. The world may be thinner than ever, but these things fill its gaps with meaning.
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